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Comment by esalman | Hacker News Reader

I used to hire at a startup. Following are the things I usually looked at. These are not sorted by severity, some are red flags but others are just irrelevant.

* not following instruction in the job advert

* CC resume to many recipients

* weird sender name in email

* compressed resume

* begging for job in the cover letter

* photo

* "career objective"

* personal information

* broken links

* clear lack of personalization in the resume format

* irrelevant background/experience

* inactive github profile (only uploaded projects etc.)

* MS Office skills

* acknowledgement, signature

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Be careful with the "photo" bit. Some parts of the world include photos on resumes as a default, along with age and marital status. I still dislike seeing them on principal, same reason I liked Hired.com's "hide name" option to help remove biases in the resume screening process.

I agree with you. If it is a part of the resume submission system then that's fine. I just mean that personally photo and personal information are irrelevant to me.

> "career objective"

is interesting to me because that's usually one of the first things I'm asked when interviewing.

I should say boilerplate career objective statements ;)

MS Office skills lol.

A lot of software developers, myself included, do lack MS-Office skills beyond beginner-level because we are totally disinterested in it.

So if you are genuinely knowledgable about it then it could be worth a quick mention.

At a certain level, knowing how to get ideas approved by creating a PowerPoint slide becomes important. So does being able to create a properly formatted statement of work or proposal. They both help to convince your current company the benefits of letting you work on the new and shiny technology that will boost your resume and they help you to get freelance gigs.

Yep, you'll be surprised how many candidates list this.

I'm sorry, but some of my github activity is best be kept private.

I think Github profiles can now show activity in private repos (without showing the actual code, obviously), if you choose to turn this feature on. This is potentially useful for those of us who have 99% of their commits in private repos.

However, it gets removed when you're removed from that private repo, I believe. A prior employer used Github, and my worked showed up on that activity graph thing, but when I left, it all disappeared.

Really? That's super annoying!

I found it just to be a good reminder that chasing "GitHub streaks" is ephemeral meaninglessness, although it was counterintuitive behavior.

I understand. I mean that some candidates create a github profile and upload a couple of projects- just to be able to link that in the resume.

Photo on resume seems like a South Asia defacto standard. At least from what I have seen in Pakistan and India. Cultural differences.

It most certainly isn't a de facto standard in India. Some eople find the need to include a photo but it's entirely useless.

Same here in Germany.

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